Beetle in a Box

          My father likes his fried eggs firm. On Saturday mornings, the only mornings he tolerates Western cuisine, he expects on the dining table one firm fried egg, seven cherry tomatoes, two raw pieces of white bread slathered with nothing but peanut butter, and a cup of black coffee. He eats his breakfast methodically and in complete silence. 

          Silence is a variety. My father harbors the heavy kind that, with its immense mass, warps and thickens the air around him. In 6th grade, I learned the Earth's atmospheric pressure alone is able to crush a soda can, but the human body has evolved to withstand it. Living under my father’s silence for thirteen years, my body, too, has adapted well to the heightened pressure. 

          My father’s silence seems to weigh him down the most. His large, protruding belly, which hangs over his sweats and reaches for the floor, is ample testimony. But he does not drink. His belly is not a beer belly—or cannot be—because when I think of beer, I think of Dionysius, the Greek god of wine, glowing pink and chortling. And I arrive at the silly conclusion that my father lacks the jollity to pop a can. 

When my father is out of earshot, my mother diagnoses him as if she were his doctor. He controls the little things, she says, because he cannot control the larger calamities in his life, such as unemployment or the lack of a green card or the death of his father. He has isolated himself because he cannot face these problems. He is sick in the mind. He is in pain on the inside and will not seek help. This, she says very often. 

          Investigating the individual experience of pain, Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein used the analogy of a beetle in a box. In Wittgenstein’s hypothetical scenario, each person has a box, and inside is what they call a “beetle.” Everyone knows what a “beetle” is by looking into their own box, but the content of the other boxes is a mystery. And each box contains a different object, or none at all. The only way for others to understand our pain is by conversing with us in public language, language deployed in universal contexts. Private language, exclusively understood by one, is incoherent and useless in communication. I know my father has a box and a beetle and pain. But he only speaks his silence, and that is a private language I do not understand. 

// 

          My father likes his books dense. He likes me tensed by his side, squinting into bulky classics with pages that seem to be held hostage between the covers. Since the day I formed my first words, he has beckoned me to sit with him and read. I will never forget the complacent grunt-sigh he breathed as he settled into the couch, brick of a book in hand. 

          Today, its Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. The only part of the book I like so far is the cover, adorned with a shiny gold embossing of a train and fancy letters. A weariness overcomes me as I imagine the blocks of tiny text behind the ornate design. 

          “I’ll go first today,” my father says as he sighs his sigh and settles into the couch. He refers to the ‘reading system’ he has established and maintained for the past decade. One of us must read three pages before switching off to the other. 

          “The Levin and Shcherbatsky families, belonging to the old nobility of Moscow, had always been on friendly terms,” he reads, “While Levin was studying at the university the intimacy had grown closer…” 

          My father’s deep, soft voice resembles that of a British nature documentary narrator. The lengthy Russian names do not phase his flow, and he drones from one paragraph to the next. I

yawn. The walls of text begin to blur as his words synchronize into a low hum, like a lullaby, rocking me to sleep. 

          I wake up to a flash of gold. Then a dull thwack. Then, a searing pain in my scalp. “You think I like this shit?!” My father shouts in Korean. Dazed, I note that my second language has never sounded so serrated, before I see him standing over me, gripping the book with a shaking hand. Corporal punishment in our household has always followed forewarning and procedure. But now, there is this primal, irrational glint in his eyes that suddenly renders my limbs rigid and my breathing shallow. 

          Thwack. I raise my arms to my face too late. This time, the book hits the right side of my head, just above my temple. 

He grits his teeth so hard, I can almost hear them, “All these years, I’ve been doing this for you, and you choose to disrespect me. Why do you not understand?” 

          He slowly lifts Anna Karenina again, the way a carpenter lifts his hammer. But his arm gives out and his belly sags and defeat supplants the wild in his eyes. He places the book on the couch beside me. Then he leaves without a word, abandoning me to silence. Silence is a variety, and this is the taut kind. The kind that hovers between a fox and a rabbit before it bolts into its burrow. 

          I fold my knees to my chest and stare at the gold embossed train on the cover of Anna Karenina until it seems to run towards my face on invisible tracks, larger and larger on the glossy leather. I blink, and it shrinks back. It cannot reach me. 

          I am not sure how much time passes. My mind, always agile, un-numbs itself and twiddles the situation for excuses. Maybe my father is sick of his box. After decades of letting it sit and stew, maybe he is kicking it around, slicing it open, seeking commiseration for the pain

inside. Maybe in desperation, he is shaking the box and its beetles over my body, hoping I will bruise, then understand. Maybe the wild I saw in his eyes was not some crazed possession of violence, but frustration that his daughter, half of his mind, cannot fathom his anguish. 

Maybe all this. But my scalp throbs hard from the angled spine of Anna Karenina. Unfortunately, the pain he inflicted has only splattered on my skin like a raw egg, unable to sink further. Pain births pain; mother and child are not the same. 

// 

          My father likes his phone calls blunt. Two years after the Anna Karenina incident, I am a high school freshman enrolled in boarding school. My father is now in South Korea. At long last, the United States has waved his green card-less pockets farewell. 

          He calls me on Sunday at 6:00 PM, like he does every week. 

          Our conversations are usually a series of statistics. How many hours of sleep did I get last night? 6. My score on the math test? 89. How many days before the orchestra concert? 4. “Hello?” 

          “Hello,” my father says, “I have something to tell you.” 

          “Okay,” I say. Then there is silence. 

          Silence is a variety, and I am not sure what to call this kind. But it swells and swells like a poached egg before my father slices it open. 

          “I’ve been doing a lot of research. I’ve realized I had depression for most of your life. I thought you should know.” His tone is plain and does not waver, as if this is just another number in our lives. 

          Public language. I choke out a sob.  

          He must have deemed my reaction insufficient, because he adds in the same blankness: “I wanted to kill myself almost everyday.”